by Ramy Vance
Once our prints were taken (our hands had to be washed and treated for burns first), Egya and I were separated. I was guided to a room with a desk and one-way mirror. Presumably so was Egya.
Then I waited.
And waited.
And waited some more.
I’d been in similar situations before, so I knew the drill. They wanted us to get nervous, because nervous people talked. The trouble with me and waiting was that, as an insomniac, former vampire who hunted in the night, when I wasn’t talking to myself, I was really good at sitting perfectly still for long periods of time. It’s not that I went asleep or anything. I just kind of shut off. Meditation on overdrive. When I’d go into that state as a vampire, I’d actually stop breathing. As a human, I couldn’t do that, of course, but my breaths were low and shallow and infrequent. Not sure if this skill would have real world applications, but one thing I noticed happened when I did this was I made other humans really nervous. And in situations like this, I got a bit of sick pleasure out of that.
The door flung open, and the way the detective—a woman with a gray suit and an olive button-up shirt—burst in, I knew she’d seen me through the one-way mirror and thought I’d had a seizure or something.
The movement caused me to turn. When I animated, I could see the detective visibly relax.
“What the hell are you doing?” she asked.
“Meditating,” I answered honestly.
“Meditating?”
“Well, kind of. I play old movies in my head. It relaxes me.”
She raised one eyebrow. “Huh?”
“This time I was screening An American Werewolf in London—the original, not the remake in Paris. I was playing the scene where they were walking back to the pub and—”
“And why were you playing that movie in particular?”
It was my turn to raise an eyebrow. “Because … did you see that thing? I kind of feel like I was attacked by a werewolf myself. I’m sort of wondering if I’m going to turn into a giant bulldog with hot, lava-like blood.”
“I see,” the detective said, taking off her glasses and sitting down across from me. “And you do this to—what?—relax? Why do you need to relax?”
I gave the detective a wry smile. This wasn’t the first time I had found myself in an interrogation room for killing something—or killing someone. Caught plenty of times when I was a vampire. This was, however, the first time I was in a place like this as a human—and for killing an Other.
As a vampire, I’d wait until it got really late and bite my way out. As a human, I would need another tack. Luckily, I was one of those psychological Hannibal Lecter–type killer vampires (as opposed to the hack-and-slash kind) and was used to playing mind games. Unhinging the detective with my meditation trick was a start. Better she was nervous than me … but still, if I was going to get out of here, I needed to be very careful what I said and didn’t say.
So I considered her question before replying evenly, “How many people, innocent or guilty, get put in a room like this and don’t need to relax?” I gave subtle emphasis to the word innocent.
“You’ve got a point,” the detective said. She stuck out her hand. “Detective Sarah Wilcox. And you are?”
“Katrina Darling, but you know that already, from my statement. I suspect that you know a lot more than that, too.”
She nodded. “OK—yes—I’ve run your name through the databases. So can you imagine what came back in your file?”
I froze. It was possible she had uncovered that I was an ex-vampire. I had done my best to hide my tracks. I paid a lot to get myself a long-form birth certificate, I fabricated a death certificate for a fake father who’d died prematurely from a heart attack … I even had my bogus dad set up a trust fund for me—an accumulation of my assets collected over the centuries of long life.
In my human story, Dad was a diplomat and we’d moved around a lot—that way I could have fewer ties and less (read: zero) schoolmates to remember me. Hell, I even set up a Facebook page with doctored photos of me doing human activities in the sun as a little girl (thank the GoneGods for stock photography and Photoshop).
Still, humans—the AlwaysMortals, that is—were paranoid about Others, even former Others, and had created a registry for beings like me to sign. There was even an amnesty program for vampires, werewolves, ghouls and zombies—expunging us from any legal recourse for the murders we committed when we were an Other.
But … I never did. And technically speaking, that meant I was breaking the law.
Detective Wilcox turned the file around. It was thin, with only a couple pages visible. Evidently, she wasn’t going to tell me what she’d found without me asking. GoneGodDamn it—any upper hand I had with my meditation trick would be gone if I asked. Still, I had to know.
I sighed inwardly. “What?”
“Nothing,” she said with a smirk—she knew she’d just won this battle of wills. “But you were awfully nervous, given how little there is about you.”
“Well, you know—it’s my first time talking to a real detective,” I lied.
“Sure, sure. These are unusual circumstances.” She pointed at the mirror, and a few seconds later a cop walked in with a file and my bag. “But we had expected more, even for a young first-year like yourself.”
I shrugged. “I moved around a lot and my dad was a very private person. Before he died, that is.”
“Yes, your file mentioned that. Sorry for your loss.”
I nodded. She was the second person today to offer me condolences for a man who died before the Titanic sank.
“OK, Ms. Darling, there are a few other things we need to know.” Detective Wilcox turned the file back to her, extracted an envelope, pulled out some photos and spread them out in front of me.
I had expected the photographs to be of the crime scene—the Old Librarian strung up, his organs displayed like pastry in a bakery—but instead, they were pictures of the Old Librarian alive, healthy and smiling. Then there were photos of him and me speaking beside the display cases. And finally, a photo of me standing outside the library at night—it must have been taken just before I tried to break in. Barely two hours ago.
“These certainly tell a story,” she said.
“How did you get those?”
“CCTV—there are cameras all over campus.”
“Hmph.” I picked up the photo of the Old Librarian and looked at it. My voice softened. “Did he suffer?”
Detective Wilcox narrowed her eyes. She hadn’t been expecting that question. Not at this point, at least. “Excuse me?”
“When he was killed—did he suffer?” I wasn’t playing a mind game with the detective; this wasn’t a trick like the meditation. I really wanted to know if he had suffered in the end.
“I would like to answer your question, but before I do, I need to know … what makes you ask that?”
“It’s just that the way he was killed—it was ritualistic, or psychotic, or both. Point is, it was preplanned. His killer wanted to hang him that way, wanted to cut him open that way. Wanted to pull out his organs that way. Either the killer was doing that because he—”
“He?”
“He, she, it—whatever,” I said, annoyed with myself for the assumption the killer was a boy (this was the GoneGod World—girls were just as capable as boys of being killers). That and accidently hinting that I might know something when I didn’t. “My point is … either the Old Librarian suffering was part of this or it wasn’t. And given how much blood and gore and dismemberment there was … why didn’t someone hear his screams? Someone like, oh, I dunno, the police?”
The detective glared at me, but I kept going.
“Maybe the killer put him asleep before doing what … ahh, it … did.”
She folded her arms. “That’s quite the astute observation for someone with a file thinner than a rice cake.”
I shrugged. “I watch a lot of TV.”
The detective raised one eyebrow.
/> “A lot.”
“OK,” she said, “tell you what: I’ll answer your question if you answer mine.”
“You really going to blackmail me into speaking to you over the question of whether or not my friend suffered when he died?”
Detective Wilcox paused at this. “No, I suppose not. From blood splatter, an examination of his body and blood work that measured the presence of adrenaline and other elements, our best guess is that the initial cuts were done with him fully awake, but as soon as those preliminary steps were taken, the killer drugged him. After that, he probably didn’t feel much when he, she or it really started to get into it.”
Really started to get into it. Well, that’s one way of describing what had happened.
“So you don’t know who the killer is?” I said.
Detective Wilcox pursed her lips, putting on her best poker face, but after centuries of playing mind games myself, I knew the answer. She had no idea who the killer was.
“Nothing on the cameras, then?” I asked.
Lips pursed. Poker face. Nothing.
“What about the Other that Egya and I killed? He could have been acting alone, right?”
She shook her head. “No, he wasn’t. But we’ll get to him in a moment.”
She emptied the contents of my bag onto the table. There was lip gloss, a vintage wallet containing forty measly bucks, my student ID, my debit card and credit card, my phone, my dorm keys and the O3 flyer.
Oh, and my father’s cherub mask. They’d confiscated that from my jacket pocket pretty quickly.
She picked up the flyer. “O3 is still at it, eh?”
“Excuse me?” I narrowed my eyes.
“O3—the party organizers. My cousin’s one of them.”
“Oh? Which one?”
She paused for a moment like she was considering not telling me, before she finally said, “Nate.”
“Yeah, I know him. Sort of. More like I know of him. And from what I know—nice guy.”
“You have no idea.” She dropped the flyer, looking at my other stuff. “Very well, then, let’s start by you telling me what this is.” She picked up the mask.
“Give that back,” I said, lunging forward. I immediately regretted doing that—just another instance where I was giving the detective the advantage, probably even playing right into her hands—but seeing my father’s mask in this cop’s said hands stirred some old rage in me. I was simultaneously scared by the image of the Divine Cherub and upset that another person dared touch my father’s most prized possession.
“Hold on, missy,” she said, pulling back. “So this is important to you, huh? What is it?”
“Sun protector,” I said. “I wear it to keep all those nasty UV rays off my face.”
“Cute,” she said. She dropped it on the table, just out of my reach.
“I don’t know why I’m being difficult. I guess I’m just scared,” I thought.
“Makes sense. You just saw a dead body. I’ve been on the force for years and I’m still not used to it.”
“Yeah, you’re probably right,” I said out loud—on purpose this time.
“So, the mask? Care to elaborate?”
“It’s … very old. An antique, you might say.” A family heirloom, you might say, I was careful to think silently.
“And … not a sun protector, I take it.”
I shook my head. “No—just something my dad gave me. It’s been in our family for generations,” I admitted, glossing over the fact that I had stolen it from the library.
The detective looked at me expectantly. I was lying to her by omitting certain facts, but it wasn’t like I could just come out and say that I stole the mask from the library, but it wasn’t technically stealing because it really was a family heirloom.
So I did what I always did in situations like this: I kept lying.
Fake it till you make it. That was basically the ex-Other motto.
“I brought the mask with me to university because …”
“Because …?”
I shrugged, assuming a carefully guarded look of sadness. “It reminds me of Da’ … and I’m homesick.”
She looked up at me, putting down the pen.
“The mask—it was something my father really loved and, well, I guess I wanted to have something to remember him by.”
Detective Wilcox stared at me for a long time before finally nodding and saying, “OK—you’re free to go.” She handed me a card. “If you think of anything else, please call me directly.”
“What?” I took the card, staring at it blankly, a bit surprised this was it. “Nothing else? No questions about what I saw, felt … did?”
“The officer on the scene already got your statement. If we need anything else from you, I’ll be sure to contact you.”
“So that’s it? I’m free to go?”
“That is what I said.”
I didn’t move.
Detective Wilcox gave me a curious look. She gestured at the mask. “We know that didn’t have anything to do with the librarian’s murder. What’s more, forensics is pretty advanced these days and we didn’t find a single hair strand, fabric fiber, fingerprint or DNA sample of yours on the scene.”
“Really? You got that already?”
She sighed. “No. But I don’t expect to find anything. We have campus security footage that clearly shows you leaving your dorm and going for a walk at the time of the murder. Because of those little cameras everywhere, violating your privacy rights but aiding in allowing your freedom to have privacy rights, you have an airtight alibi.”
“Oh?” I said. “Oh! Well … good thing I’m not that private of a person anyway.”
The detective gave me a suspicious look, then shook her head. She was clearly tired. “Unless there is a reason I should be arresting you … you are free to go.” She pointed at the door.
I know that was what I wanted, but being let go so easily really boiled my blood. For one thing, I was the first person on the scene, and the junior cop who took my statement had barely scratched the surface of what I could tell them. Granted, a lot of what I knew stemmed from my experience as a vampire, and I wanted to protect that secret as best I could—but still! Couldn’t this self-important detective recognize an asset when she saw one?
But that wasn’t what really upset me. No, what engulfed my recently returned soul in flame was that she was letting me walk after I killed an Other. A living, breathing Other.
“Is Other life so worthless that you could literally kill one of them and not go to jail? Or—even if I killed him in self-defense—can’t the authorities at least investigate with more than a passing interest? Last I checked, killing someone in self-defense at least requires an investigation. I should be calling my lawyer. I should be explaining over and over again how I had to kill him. I should—”
“Actually, what you killed wasn’t a sentient Other,” she said, interrupting my out-loud thoughts. “It was a kelb. A common jinni elemental, often used as a guard dog. Which means—”
“So?” I asked, with perhaps a bit too much venom in my tone for someone who was being let go. “Shouldn’t I still be charged with something? Or at least investigated?”
“As much as you would like to be a martyr for Other equal rights by forcing me to arrest you, kelb is a type-C classification Other. It is the Other equivalent of a domestic dog or cat—although who would want something so big and vicious as a pet, I have no idea. We do not file cases against killed pets—especially when it was clearly done in self-defense. That’s up to the owner. And since the owner is clearly the killer, I doubt he or she will be filing a suit against you anytime soon.”
I took a minute to let that sink in. The creature Egya and I killed was a guard dog of sorts unleashed on us by its master. Not the killer at all.
“Oh?” I said, kind of wishing I’d asked first, ranted later—out-loud thoughts or not. “OK, then.” I stood up and put the contents of my purse back into my bag, including my father
’s mask. Once that was done, I paused and looked Detective Wilcox directly in the eyes. “You said you have footage of the murder.”
She nodded.
“So you know who the killer is?”
She gave me a look that said she couldn’t answer that.
“Come on—you’ve got to give me something. The librarian was my friend. The only friend I’ve made since I got here.”
Wilcox shook her head, cursing to herself. “This stays in this room.”
“OK—cross my heart.” I did so, to show her I was serious.
“The assailant was … blurred.”
“Blurred?”
“Yeah—like what you see in documentaries where the interviewee wants to remain anonymous.”
“Magic?”
“We can only assume,” Detective Wilcox said. “We can gather quite a bit of evidence from the video, but a clear ID? Not as of yet. But we’ll get the bastard. I promise you.”
“Thank you,” I said. Then I pulled my purse strap onto my shoulder and headed out the door.
HYENAS AND DENIAL ARE LIKE OIL AND WATER
T he cops were less willing to take me back home than they had been to take me in. I guess it tends to be a one-way flow. Not that it really mattered—the campus was about a twenty-minute walk away. Stepping outside, I saw that dawn had already come and gone, and what greeted me was the morning hustle-bustle of a city getting ready for work.
I wrapped my ruined jacket close to my body, held my purse tight and entered the flow of people walking to work. Montreal is a beautiful city—there’s no doubt about it—but at that moment I wanted nothing more than to leave this place far behind. I mean, I had been here less than a day and already I had seen the inside of a police station.
And the inside of my only friend’s chest cavity.
But there was one more thing to consider. I had killed. Yes, in self-defense, and it was only an attack dog that I felled. Granted, I killed a fire-breathing attack dog the size of a bull from the jinn’s mythical realm of Qa, but still: I killed. Coming to university was my attempt at being a normal, average human. Normal and average usually means does not kill … but here I was, on day one, stabbing my dirk into someone’s neck. I could chalk it up to seeing my friend strung up like a macabre puppet, something that could believably have brought out my old instincts, but that would be a lie. Truth was, as a vampire, I was good at killing. I may have lost most of my powers when I became human, but I didn’t lose everything.